This was my favourite book when I was eight years old. I know exactly what age I was when I first read it, because I wrote a book of my own that year – The History of the Little Toy Soldier, by R. W. Maslen (as I signed myself then) – and the teacher who commented on it put the date at the end in his beautiful italic hand: 23.3.71. The Little Toy Soldier is a fusion of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Steadfast Tin Soldier and Moray Williams’s novel. The protagonist is made of wood, not tin, and swims the ocean just as Moray Williams’s horse does, losing much of his paint in the process, and many of his other adventures have close parallels with those of his distinguished predecessor. Like Moray Williams’s, my book has a happy ending; this was, in fact, the reason I wrote it. I had been outraged by the dismal fate of Andersen’s toy, and fusing the steadfast tin soldier with the little wooden horse was the perfect way to give him the Happily Ever After I felt he deserved. More interestingly, at least to me, it testifies to the tastes of a middle-class eight-year-old boy at the beginning of the 1970s, when fantasy as a genre was just coming into existence, and when the map of it looked very different from the way it does now. The Little Wooden Horse was central to my imaginative map, and online reviews of this short novel suggest that my love of it was shared by many other readers, and may even have shaped their reading and writing practices as it shaped mine.
The Little Wooden Horse is by no means a Lost Book, at least in Britain. It has been in print since it was first published, and my Puffin edition, reissued in 1963, says it is ‘already fairly established as one of the classic children’s books of this century’. But friends of mine in the United States – people with an intimate knowledge of fantasy for children – have never heard of it, though it had an early American edition. Some of them may have noticed that it’s mentioned in Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn’s seminal book on Children’s Fantasy Literature, but there it is described somewhat dismissively as a typical example of a theme that was well established in Britain between the wars, that of the toy-as-servant, the toy that lives only for the sake of serving its owner. The little wooden horse, say Levy and Mendlesohn, is ‘humble and unctuous’, and its servility makes the narrative ‘reminiscent of earlier, nineteenth-century fantasies’.[1] That’s one way of reading it, certainly, though it doesn’t fit the template of nineteenth-century children’s fantasy they provide in their chapter on the subject, which makes a strong case for the Victorian fantastic as deeply embedded in ‘house-based action’, that is, action contained within the limits of the domestic household;[2] the little wooden horse, by contrast, goes on extensive travels before returning to his master. The notion of the toy as an unctuous servant doesn’t work for me either. The wooden horse’s ‘master’ is a poor toymaker with no other servants – not even a real live horse, whose role the wooden horse takes on by carrying the toymaker’s wares from town to town so the old man doesn’t have to carry them himself. Moreover, the wooden horse leaves home because his master has fallen ill, implicitly through poverty; and when you’re roving from job to job in search of employment to save the life of a sick dependent, I’m not sure politeness and obedience can be classified as ‘unctuousness’. I do know that when I read Moray Williams’s book at eight years old it made me cry, and that it stuck in my mind as no other book did at the time (except Edward Lear’s Nonsense Omnibus, but that’s another story). I don’t think I’d have fallen so hard for a mid-twentieth century version of Dickens’s unctuously servile Uriah Heep. I remember that there was a distinctive emotional atmosphere about this story that lifted it out of the ordinary, one that I never found again except in some of Moray Williams’s other books, such as Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat (1942) and The Three Toymakers (1946). In tribute to that atmosphere, and to the deep impression the book made on me, I’d like to consider what makes Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse exceptional among offerings for young readers.
Moray Williams’s book is itself a fusion of earlier classics, from the stories about animated objects told by Andersen in his many fairy tales (1835-1874) to the original horse story, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), and the adventures of the wooden puppet Pinocchio, introduced to the world by Carlo Collodi in 1883. It has a simple plot, as Kaye Webb points out in her blurb, in which a wooden horse with wheels is made by an old toymaker who then loses his business to mass-produced toys made of tin and china and so falls on hard times. The wooden horse, who works for the toymaker because he loves him, decides he must make some money for his ailing master, and sets out on his titular adventures. These take him from one side of a nameless ocean to the other and through every walk of life, where he encounters kindness, cruelty, thoughtlessness, affection, greed and many dangers, before making his way back to the toymaker carrying a fortune in his little wooden body. If that plot sounds episodic, it is; but the episodes are so cleverly woven together, the adventures so harrowing, and the horse himself such a complex figure, that the effect is little short of epic. I read the Penguin edition of The Odyssey not long after reading Moray Williams’s book, and I now think I may have been led from one to the other by affinities between them.
The little wooden horse is complex, not so much because of his character – he is, as he often repeats in a kind of chorus, ‘a quiet little horse’ who would rather stay at home than seek his fortune[3] – as because of his nature, and the various ways the people he meets respond to it. What exactly is he? A toy? A horse? A person? He can talk like a human being, and is often treated by adults as though he had the human right to be paid for his labour. He has wooden wheels mounted on a platform to which his legs are attached, which makes him a toy, but he can also jump, kick, gallop and swim as well as any horse – though sometimes with unforeseen effects on his wooden body. Sometimes he finds work as a toy – as when a harassed father employs him as a plaything for his many unruly children – and sometimes as a working animal, for instance when he pulls a barge along a canal or joins a group of pit ponies hauling coal in a mine; his size, then, seems to fluctuate along with his identity. He can be broken and mended like any other wooden object, but he also feels pain, which is a quality seldom found in objects.[4] The wooden horse’s versatility resembles that of a child’s imagination, which can slot the same toy into a range of different adventures, but some of the adventures he embarks on are based on a knowledge of working conditions well beyond the scope of most young children.
The multiplicity of the wooden horse’s identity means he is subject to the sort of double vision we apply to puppets, as explained by Steve Tillis in the following passage:
the puppet is a theatrical figure, perceived by an audience to be an object, that is given design, movement, and frequently, speech, so that it fulfils the audience’s desire to imagine it as having life; by creating a double-vision of perception and imagination, the puppet pleasurably challenges the audience’s understanding of the relationship between objects and life.[5]
But the Little Wooden Horse is not a theatrical figure, which means that certain abilities he has need to be visualised by the reader rather than staged; and some of those abilities are hard to visualise. How do you gallop when you’re mounted on a platform with wooden wheels? How do you unscrew your own head to put coins in your wooden body for safekeeping? How do you balance on a circus tightrope when you have four wheels, one at each corner of the platform, rather than two wheels in alignment? When your head falls off, how do you go looking for it when you have no eyes to look with? Moray Williams offers no explanation of how these actions are accomplished, which means that the wooden horse’s body seems to exist in a state of flux; your visualisation of it needs to be constantly adjusted to accommodate the needs of each new episode. The horse’s identity, too, is more multiple than can be accommodated by Tillis’s double vision. He is not merely both an object and a being endowed with life, but an object which is also an animal which is also (for certain purposes) a person – as well as being sometimes an adult person and sometimes a child. The work of the reader in imagining the little wooden horse is more complicated than the work of the theatre audience in imagining a puppet to be endowed with life. It requires a more active engagement with or involvement in the story, which may well explain why I chose to write a story of my own after reading the novel; by the time I had finished the last page, Moray Williams had given me a thorough apprenticeship in the challenges of imaginative creation.
His multiplicity makes the wooden horse rather hard to draw. Moray Williams’s book has been published with illustrations by many different hands, but to me the best are by Peggy Fortnum, who provided the pictures for the first Puffin edition. Fortnum is now best known as the first illustrator of the Paddington books, but her work for The Little Wooden Horse is even better, since it resolves the difficult question of how to picture a living object that can fulfil so many functions. Fortnum eschews the ‘clean line’ favoured by many children’s book illustrators, opting instead for a dynamic, rhythmic style which emphasizes action, and which is perfect for invoking the consequences of action too – the battering and dirtiness that comes from interacting with a rough environment. Fortnum often includes lines on the page which indicate the speed of the horse’s forward motion, or the swishing of his tail, or the lashing of wind and rain as he swims the ocean. She adds dots and more lines to many of her pictures to show the dust and stains accrued by the actions she is depicting. Her pictures are messy, which exactly suits a book which is deeply concerned with the messiness of the life into which its readers, like its protagonist, have been plunged.
Certain qualities of the horse remain stable through all his changes, above all the ones implicit in his name, which is not a name at all but a description. He is the Little Wooden Horse, not Ned or Atlas or Dobbin. That he is a wooden horse helps to make him epic – if you google the name you’ll mostly come up with the siege engine built by the Greeks to get into Troy – but it also ensures he’s always got both an equine quality and a woodenness about him – the woodenness making him as steadfast as Andersen’s toy soldier; he never wavers in his loyalty to his sick maker. He’s also little, and so always represented as smaller than other objects or beings he encounters – other toys, other horses, other people – no matter how his implied size may vary. His size does vary, since at one point he’s large enough to pull a carriage, at another small enough to be carried off by the youngest child in a family and dropped in a stream, but his littleness is always an integral part of him; the barge people, for instance, are astonished at his strength in relation to his size. He encounters other little people in his adventures: a little old woman who takes in Uncle Peder when he falls ill, a miner’s little boy who plays with him in the kitchen of a cottage, the youngest child who drops him in the stream, who is both an ‘honest little boy’ and a careless one (p. 108). Williams’s frequent use of the epithet ‘little’ in her book, above all in the incantatory repetitions of the protagonist’s name, underscores her commitment to the ‘little’ people who ensure things run as they should: from the bargemen and bargewomen who convey necessary articles from A to B to the miners who supply coal for industries and homes and the sailors who transport that coal across the ocean; from the women who run most households to the toymakers who supply goods for their children, and of course the children themselves, without whom any community will soon die out. The Little Wooden Horse is the epic of the little, its title suggests, to be appreciated by readers who have a proper respect for the value of small things.
(I met with some criticism for using the term ‘little’ too much in my homage to Williams’s novel, The Little Toy Soldier. My teacher said nice things about it, but urged me to make it shorter by ‘cutting out the “obvious” bits’. Above all, he wrote, ‘Avoid the adjectives “pretty”, “nice” and “little”’ – the last of which I used more often even than Moray Williams does. He had a point, of course, but the same rule doesn’t apply to all narratives, and Moray Williams’s book would be a very different affair – a diminished affair, I think – if it had not been so liberally sprinkled with ‘littles’.)
The little wooden horse’s horsiness is confirmed by the many horses he meets at each stage of his journey. Moray Williams and her twin sister Barbara were passionate riders – we’re told they started riding on home-made hobby horses before graduating to actual ponies – and Ursula went on writing about horses throughout her career (there’s a full list of her equestrian stories at this excellent website). The world of the wooden horse is driven by horses; they are its engine and the fuel that feeds it, from the snobbish rocking horse he meets in a nursery to the farmer’s horses alongside whom he works at harvest time, from the powerful barge horses ‘who made the little wooden horse look very small indeed’ to the lazy and jealous pit ponies who leave him to work by himself in a corner of the mine, from the team of kindly white horses which pulls the king’s carriage to the aggressive thoroughbreds at the royal racecourse and the big red hunter he meets at a blacksmith’s forge. Each horse he meets compares the Little Wooden Horse to themselves, often unfavourably, and he is forced to prove his equine credentials by beating them at their own respective games. The rocking horse dismisses him as too scratched and cheap to live in a wealthy household, but its judgment is overturned when its owner, a rich little girl, falls in love with him and asks him to commission an identical wooden horse from Uncle Peder. When he applies for a job with the farm horses the farmer first laughs at him ‘through his great black beard’, but soon stops laughing when he proves his worth by harnessing himself to the heaviest carts and pulling the biggest loads (p. 32). He proves himself as a barge horse, despite his size, by winning a race against the larger barge horses; confirms his worth as a pit pony by rescuing other ponies when a tunnel collapses; puts the whiteness of his painted body to good use when pulling the royal carriage as part of the colour-matched team; and shows himself a genuine racehorse by winning the Golden Trophy for his sponsor, the youngest of the ‘ten little Princes and Princesses’ in the royal family. The only time he fails to prove his worth is in his final horse-related adventure, when he finds himself swimming across the ocean in the company of a horde of angry sea horses, which ‘skimmed over the tops of the waves with such ease that the little wooden horse felt awkward beside them’. One of these ‘lovely little creatures’ demands contemptuously how he dare call himself a horse: ‘Look at you! Are you like a horse, I’d like to know?’ (p. 133); and the wooden horse replies by listing his credentials: he has two ears, two eyes, a mane, a tail, and ‘four strong wooden legs’ (p. 134). It’s the last of these attributes, ironically – the legs that for many readers will define a horse – that convinces the sea horses he is not one of them. ‘Whoever heard of a horse with legs?’ they scream, ‘Why, horses have fins!’ (p. 134). For the rest of this episode the ‘beautiful, wicked sea-horses’ seek to punish him for his temerity in calling himself a horse (p. 135), and he is only rescued by a helpful sailor who hauls him out of the water onto a ship – though the ship is sunk a short time later by the vengeful steeds of the sea, who are still trying to get at the wooden horse and dash him to pieces. The wooden horse manages to evade their attentions as the ship goes down, but his identity has never seemed so precarious. He has been judged and found wanting, at last, by creatures whose own physical form seems to run counter to most widely-accepted definitions of the equine.
The sea-horses, of course, are quite wrong in their judgement of the little wooden horse, since by this time in the story he has been accepted as authentically equine many times over. Indeed, the many kinds of horse our hero has met underlines an essential truth about equinicity: that it comes in many shapes and sizes, each with its own particular qualities. Even the donkeys the wooden horse finds on a foreign beach are clearly his kin, and he happily takes his place among them to work for a helpful old couple who mended him when he was broken, unconcerned as to whether or not donkeys and horses are (as the dictionary tells us) separate species. Moray Williams was writing, of course, at a time when the discourse of race had been violently thrown into the political foreground by the rise of Nazism; her little wooden horse, then, stands as a refutation of the Nazi doctrine of racial ‘purity’, and the sea horses serve as elegant illustrations of the absurd and toxic rhetoric that underpins it. If the little wooden horse’s identity exists in a state of constant flux, it fluctuates no more than any category or community we seek to define, and definitions themselves are useful only as contingent descriptors, not as zones designed to exclude, condemn or repress those who lie beyond their borders. This is the only conclusion the reader can reach after seeing the protagonist repeatedly dismissed as no horse only to be accepted as one a few pages later; not merely as a horse, in fact, but as the best of horses, whose qualities are worthy of being dispersed throughout society by the manufacture of further copies of our hero, each commissioned from Uncle Peder by a person who has been impressed by his courage, kindness, resilience and honesty. The wooden horse, in other words, is responsible for redefining horsiness all by himself, and offers hope that such positive redefinitions are possible, and can bring about improvements to a world that is rarely as kind or equitable as we might wish.
As crucial to the little wooden horse’s identity as his littleness and his horsiness is the fact that he’s made of wood; and this fact too remains central to the story from beginning to end. We are always being reminded of it, from the moment he’s made – when tears start to flow down his ‘newly painted cheeks’ (p. 11) – to the final page, when Uncle Peder is busy carving replicas of him (‘wooden legs and wooden heads and wooden bodies’) and painting ‘red saddles and blue stripes on his new horses’ (p. 176), while their original sits quietly in the corner, going over his adventures in his head. The wooden horse’s woodenness makes him more subject to corporeal change than most living humans. Not only does he lose wheels, legs and even his head in the course of his adventures, but he is constantly changing appearance, losing his colours when Uncle Peder can no longer afford to repaint him, getting his wheels encrusted with mud when working at Farmer Max’s farm, turning black and shedding splinters as he labours in the mine, and worrying that if he changes too much Uncle Peder may no longer recognise him when they meet again. His woodenness also means he is not the exclusive work of one artificer. People are always repainting him and replacing his component parts, from the miner who carves new wheels for him with his pocket-knife to the blacksmith who makes him another set of new wheels ‘bound strongly with iron’ (p. 88), from the kind old shopkeeper who replaces a leg he broke in the circus to the donkey man and his wife who find his head and fix it onto his body. Other people ask if they can fix him – such as the ringmaster of the circus where he became a tightrope walker, or the father of the unruly children who pull off his head – but the wooden horse is choosy as to who takes a hand in his construction, unwilling (perhaps) to have his times of trauma built into his person, so to speak, in the form of a replacement limb. Nevertheless, by the end of the book the little wooden horse has become a collaborative artefact, his body assembled from parts and paint supplied by a succession of different makers, to the extent that he can be said to resist, by his continuing existence, the notions of exclusive property and elitist art. We’ll return to this later.
For all his woodenness and the collaborative nature of his construction, the little wooden horse retains a distinctive personality that could be said to haunt his increasingly battered and mended body like a ghost. We’re told that he has a hollow wooden body, well suited to containing things of all sorts, especially money; but when he gets anxious his heart beats somewhere inside it, ‘pit-a-pat! pit-a-pat!’ (pp. 18, 23, 38). His legs may be anchored to a wooden platform, yet they somehow contrive to work like a horse’s legs all the same: ‘the little wooden horse kicked his legs in the air, so that the four green wheels spun round and round’ (p. 12). When he is mistreated or damaged he gets ‘bruised’ (pp. 26, 139); when he runs a challenging race his ears buzz and ‘stars dance […] before his painted eyes’ (p. 80); when water fills him he fears he ‘shall drown’ (p. 114), and when he swims for a long time his legs begin to ache (p. 135). When he loses his head, a phantom head seems to go on thinking for him: ‘All thoughts of the money he was to have earned had gone out of his head’ (p. 109, my emphasis); and the hole left by the head’s absence puts his imaginary heart in jeopardy: when he hears an unexpected noise ‘His heart nearly jumped out of the hole in his neck’ (p. 110). The wooden horse retains his selfhood, it would appear, through sheer force of will and intensity of emotion, like Italo Calvino’s non-existent knight, who is really just an empty suit of armour with strong views about his duties as one of Charlemagne’s paladins.[6] It’s the wooden horse’s view of himself as a person, as against an object to be bought, sold, used and discarded, that carries him through his adventures, in the quite literal sense that it means he remains ‘him’ – the very same little wooden horse – despite all the changes he undergoes and the different perceptions of him with which he is confronted.
These perceptions are expressed through money: the money he thinks he’s worth; the money people will pay for him, or pay him for services rendered; the money withheld from him; the money he forgoes because it’s not worth the price he must pay for it; the money he loses or finds by chance. His travels are motivated by the quest for ready cash, and this makes the story typical of children’s stories of the pre-war period as diagnosed by Geoffrey Trease, many of which involve treasure hunts (The Midnight Folk, The Happy Mariners and The Hobbit are good examples).[7] But most treasure hunts are relatively straightforward. The process of finding the treasure is the point of the exercise, and the questions of what the treasure is, where it comes from, how it functions and what to do with it are not so important. This is not the case in Moray Williams’s novel, any more than it was in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which appeared the year before, published by Moray Williams’s uncle Sir Stanley Unwin.[8] The little wooden horse wins his treasure many times over, but loses it again repeatedly, which is part of what makes his adventures so long and hard. When he gets trapped in the mine by a rockfall, ‘nearly all his wages’ fall out of his body as he struggles to free himself and his fellow workers from their underground prison (p. 57). Later, his pay from the circus falls out of the hole which was left when he breaks his leg falling from the tightrope; he only notices the loss when he feels ‘strangely light and empty’ the morning after (p. 98). Work-related injury, Moray Williams seems to be saying, drains a worker’s resources, effectively nullifying the value of any pay they may have received. While swimming the ocean, the wooden horse has to throw away most of his earnings to keep afloat, not to save his own life but that of a sailor who mistreated him (pp. 143-146). Finding treasure or earning money is depicted as a complicated business, subject to the vicissitudes of the market, the character and values of the worker and his employers, and the fluctuations of chance from day to day.
The Little Wooden Horse, then, is not a simple treasure hunt, though in fact the wooden horse does find treasure on an island in the end, and it’s this treasure that he brings home to Uncle Peder. Even this treasure, however, needs to be earned by strenuous labour. The sailor gives it to him as payment for saving his life, which he accomplishes very nearly at the cost of his own, and certainly at the cost of all the pay he has accumulated before taking to the ocean. The process of getting the treasure is not so simple, either; it turns out that another sailor has a claim to it, and that this additional claim must be considered before the findings can be divided up. For an adult reader, this question of claims may in fact go further than Moray Williams takes it. The treasure has been hidden in a cave by some previous owner – perhaps a pirate; and the sailors who found it have the swashbuckling names of ‘Pirate Jacky’ and ‘Bill Blackpatch’, implying that they may have been involved in shady business at sea themselves. Whose treasure is it really, then – theirs, or the man’s who hid it, or the original owners’ from whom it was probably stolen? In Moray Williams’s novel, money is slippery, escaping from its containers through holes or crannies, getting lost in underground caves and discovered by strangers, or failing to be paid at all despite prior agreements. No one is its ultimate owner; rather, it resembles Bilbo’s Ring in The Lord of the Rings, an object that transfers itself from hand to hand for some devious purpose of its own, a purpose which is unknown to any of its holders, not even those who made it. Its deviousness and instability would have been deeply familiar to the book’s first readers in 1938, after more than a decade of financial crisis and economic Depression.
Money is also seductive, like Tolkien’s Ring. When the little wooden horse first sees the treasure, he responds with all the excitement of a dedicated buccaneer, enchanted by its sensuous beauty and rich abundance:
For all about the cave, in piles and heaps, in caskets, in crates, and in boxes, was such treasure as the little wooden horse had never dreamed of. Piles of golden coins, sparkling jewels, emeralds, pearls, rubies, diamonds – all flashing out of the darkness at the little wooden horse, winking at him with their sparkling eyes, saying, ‘Take us! Fill yourself with us! We are yours!’ (p. 149)
At this point in the narrative the treasure looks less like a reward for saving Pirate Jacky than a temptation to turn aside from his quest to save Uncle Peder. ‘We are yours’ (p. 149), the treasure declares, as if urging the wooden horse to consume it for his own exclusive benefit. The horse responds by loading his hollow body with precious objects:
the little wooden horse without more ado whipped off his head and scuttled round the golden heaps, picking here diamonds, there pearls, there golden coins, till his little body was filled to bursting-point, and he felt so rich he could hardly contain himself. How Uncle Peder’s eyes would pop out of his head at the sight of such a fortune! They would never be in want again! (p. 150)
Here the wooden horse whipping off his head becomes a prelude to yet another near loss of identity. By the time he is full he can ‘hardly contain himself’, which suggests he is on the verge of losing the selfhood he has struggled to preserve throughout his adventures, full of humility, kindness, resilience and concern for his elderly master. For once, he sees himself as surpassing rather than meeting Uncle Peder’s valuation of him; he anticipates the old man’s surprise at finding that his toy is now worth more than anything he has ever seen in his life. Teetering on a tightrope has nothing on this; the wooden horse has almost ceased to be the toy we have known and loved since the beginning of the book, and it’s only the appearance of the sailor Bill Blackpatch, who claims a share of the treasure he carries, that returns him to the values he has always cleaved to: values more stable and long-lasting than pearls or diamonds.
Elsewhere in the book the little wooden horse’s valuation of himself remains consistent, except on the odd occasion when he loses faith in his own appearance after a particularly damaging adventure. When Uncle Peder made him he judged him at once to be the best toy he had ever crafted, and set his price at exactly five shillings, more than he had ever charged for any of his wares. The villagers to whom he usually sold his toys were taken aback, and tried to convince him to sell the toy for less; but the old man stuck to his price: ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I have never made such a fine little horse before’ (p. 11). This work of art, then, has a proper value in its maker’s mind, and Uncle Peder never wavers in his assessment of it, even when his customers stop buying his toys in favour of the cheaper toys mass-produced in city factories. In the end, of course, the horse brings him far more than his supposed value, not only in terms of the treasure he contains but also in terms of the many commissions for identical wooden horses with which he returns from his travels; many of the people he has worked for want an exact replica of the toy, person or horse they have fallen in love with, like the rich little girl in his first adventure. Uncle Peder’s integrity in demanding a just price for his labour is more than matched by the horse’s ability to generate income from his own labours; the book makes an economic case for valuing both work and its artefacts properly, and Moray Williams ensures that this principle gets extended – thanks to the horse’s adventures and the friends he accumulates – from the cottage of a miner to the palace of a king.
All the best people in the book never question the wooden horse’s value; he is worth five shillings exactly, no more, no less. The little rich girl to whom he tries to sell himself at the beginning refuses to buy him when she hears about Uncle Peder’s illness, and instead asks him to ask the toymaker to make her ‘a little wooden horse just like you, only quite new, and then my father will give him five shillings for it’ (p. 20). The King commissions ten little wooden horses at five shillings apiece, one for each of his ten little Princes and Princesses. The circus master offers five shillings for a replacement wooden horse to perform in the ring, the miner promises to pay ‘five shillings out of my wages’ for another horse for his son to play with, the kind shopkeeper asks him to send over a ‘dozen little horses like yourself […] and I will pay him five shillings for every one of them’ (though one wonders how much he planned to sell them for), and the father of the five unruly children commissions five ‘particularly strong’ wooden horses at five shillings a head (p. 176). When the barge people agree to carry the completed new wooden horses down the canal and see them safely stowed on a ship for delivery to the land across the ocean, the foundations are laid for a system of supply and demand which is very different from the alienated labour of the industrial revolution. Through the little wooden horse’s adventures, which he tells Uncle Peder in detail, a direct relationship is established between each purchaser of one or more new little wooden horses and the craftsman who constructs them. The solidity of this relationship is guaranteed by the fact that not one of the purchasers quibbles over the asking price; it remains the same at the end of the book as it was at the beginning, which gives the sum of five shillings the quality of a promise, something more stable and substantial than the promise printed on a five pound note to pay the bearer thereof on demand the sum of five pounds in gold. Britain had in fact formally abandoned the gold standard in 1931, which meant that the banknote promise could no longer be honoured. The little wooden horse standard, it would seem, is more reliable than the gold standard among those who are willing to accept it.
Despite this seeming consensus among the little wooden horse’s friends, his value is not universally accepted. The little rich girl’s fine large rocking horse sees him as an outdated artefact worth only grinding to powder beneath his rockers. The little old woman who takes in Uncle Peder sees the wooden horse as a useless thing left behind by some naughty children who have been hammering at her door (in fact the toy has been trying to gain access to his master). Three times she throws him away – once even flinging him over her cottage roof – and is just about to chop him to pieces when he finally decides to run off and seek his fortune. The sea-horses decide he is a ‘fox’ (p. 135), which is famous for not having anything of value to offer its hunters; its meat and skin are worthless. The sailor who rescues him from the sea-horses is told that the toy is useless to him, since he has no children; and Pirate Jacky, who claims him when the sailor disowns him, puts him away in his sea-chest as a trinket to be sold for pennies at the nearest market. For many of the people who meet him, then, the little wooden horse is not a person, nor even an animal; but several are forced to change their views when their circumstances change. The rocking horse must eat his words when his owner takes the wooden horse to her heart, and is later reduced himself to an outdated artefact, battered beyond recognition by mistreatment at the hands of some more unruly children, the little girl’s cousins. The little old woman changes her opinion when she marries the toymaker, and Pirate Jackie accepts the wooden horse’s personhood when the toy saves him from drowning. The little wooden horse, in other words, can prove his worth by his actions; but his actions alone don’t determine his value, as Moray Williams is careful to show at the beginning of the book, both in the different valuations of him by the girl and her rocking horse and in the challenges to his personhood posed by his very first adventure away from his master, when he goes to work for Farmer Max.
This episode involves a difficult negotiation concerning the little wooden horse’s status as a worker. On meeting some flesh-and-blood horses in a farmer’s field, the wooden horse learns that they earn money by their labour – or rather, that their masters earn money by their labour, since ‘what is money to us?’, the horses ask. The wooden horse, however, wants money ‘very badly’; so he queues up with the horses’ masters to sign a paper ‘agreeing to work for three days for Farmer Max and to accept the payment he offered them’ (p. 31). But his desire to sign the paper prompts general laughter, and when he applies for his wages after three days of graft the farmer asks him: ‘What does a little wooden horse want with money?’, seeking to confirm the farm horses’ view of him as an animal like themselves. It’s the masters of those farm horses who demand that Farmer Max pay the wooden horse, implicitly accepting the toy as an honorary human worker. From this point onwards, the wooden horse’s status as an honorary worker remains a given for much of the book; indeed, this status is one of the reasons the pit ponies hate him, since, as they complain, ‘We don’t get any money! […] We only get kicks and blows!’ (p. 53). But being a worker does not guarantee good wages, job security, or immunity from work-related injury. Farmer Max, for instance, tricks him into working for nothing, and chases after him when he escapes as if he were a runaway animal, incidentally causing him to lose his wages for pulling the barge. Later the wooden horse is injured several times, by a collapsed tunnel at the mine, a vindictive kick from a fellow racehorse, a fall from a circus tightrope and the ‘kicks and blows’ of the unruly children. The pay he gets for his work, too, varies considerably, depending on the wealth of his employer. The king, for instance, pays him gold for drawing his coach, the wealthy man who hires him as a plaything for his unruly children pays him in silver coins (p. 110), while the children who ride him on the beach pay only in pennies – though he gets a silver coin from the donkey man at the end of each day, ‘which is,’ Moray Williams tells us, ‘as much as he had earned from the circus master’ (p. 118). In the end, the little wooden horse gets paid more often than not, and duly earns his fortune in the end through his actions; but the difficulties, griefs and torments he has endured to get that fortune leave the reader under no illusion that this ending was inevitable. Besides, the fortune he eventually acquires is not the result of a conventional contract between employer and employee; it’s as much a matter of chance that Pirate Jacky has the wherewithal to reward him for saving his life as that he should have lost all his wages through a hole in his body after leaving the circus. The world of work is in effect made up of a series of adventures, if we take the term ‘adventure’ in the old sense of ‘chance’ or ‘luck’; and anyone living through the Depression would have been keenly aware that luck or chance – together with a proper recognition on the part of employers of the worth of labour – has more of a hand in getting gainful employment than any special diligence or skill on the part of the worker.
The little wooden horse’s relationship with money, then, is by no means straightforward. In early twentieth-century children’s fiction, the closest analogy to this relationship can be found in the works of Edith Nesbit and Noel Streatfeild, whose young characters learn through bitter experience how difficult it is to accumulate cash for the relief of their families. Unlike Nesbit’s or Streatfeild’s protagonists, however, Moray Williams’s hero is a work of art, having been made to the highest standards by a master craftsman; indeed, the term ‘master’ as applied to Uncle Peder may well be intended to remind us of the mastery that turned dead wood into a living creature. Moray Williams was herself a visual artist, having trained at the Winchester College of Art alongside her twin sister Barbara; she illustrated several of her own stories, most notably The Good Little Christmas Tree (1943), which is decorated with colourful double-page ‘scissor cuts’ throughout. The question of how an artist can make a living, then, would have been as important to her as it was to her contemporary, Mervyn Peake.[9] For her, works of art did not exist in the rarefied atmosphere of the art gallery or the wealthy private household, but in the busy world where properly remunerated work is as needful as it is hard to get; indeed, The Good Little Christmas Tree articulates the same philosophy, as its protagonist – another object brought alive by the writer-artist’s imagination – is forced to pay for its own decorations by giving up needles one by one till it’s almost bald (fortunately Santa Claus steps in at the last moment to put things right). The Little Wooden Horse seems to me more a story about labour and the value of labour than about servanthood, and duly sets the artist’s or master craftsman’s labour alongside the labour of the farmhand, bargewoman, miner, circus performer, blacksmith, shopkeeper and sailor as part of the same economic system of payment for services rendered.
Moray Williams’s book is itself a beautifully crafted artefact, above all in the construction of its plot. I said earlier that it could be seen as episodic, but each adventure builds logically on the one before, and the there-and-back-again trajectory of the wooden horse’s adventures ensures that each episode is revisited and satisfyingly concluded before the end. The little wooden horse keeps recalling his adventures in a series of reflective ‘choruses’ that always begin with his description of himself as a ‘quiet little horse’, counting and accounting for events as carefully as he counts the coins that go into his body. This draws attention to the structure of the narrative as a journey or odyssey through the British class system, in which the toy that began his travels as a nobody gains recognition for his qualities from a succession of strangers. The book, then, is an inverted Odyssey, since Odysseus was already famous for his exploits (which included devising the Trojan wooden horse) before posing as a man called Nobody to fool the Cyclops Polyphemus. Unlike the wily Greek adventurer, the little wooden horse remains a nobody to the end, and rejects the notion of heroic exclusivity in favour of the more anonymous achievement of having inspired many imitations in the form of new wooden horses, each calculated to improve the lives and luck of the community or household it enters.
The wooden horse’s adventures follow on from one another and recall one another with the elegance of a piece of music. His first employer, Farmer Max, for example, is directly responsible for the wooden horse’s achievement in beating the other barges in the race to the port, since his pursuit of the wooden horse on horseback stimulates the toy into running faster than any of his competitors. The barge pulled by the wooden horse contains props for a coalmine on the other side of the ocean, and he later finds himself working in that same coalmine. When he reaches the port he gets lifted onto a ship by a crane as a joke on the part of the sailors; he later demonstrates to a sailor that he is more than just a laughing stock by saving the man from drowning. The crane deposits him in the hold of the ship, where he meets a circus elephant with whom he soon makes friends; when next he meets the elephant he is lifted into the air for a second time by a kind of crane, which turns out to be the elephant’s trunk. After rescuing the pit ponies from the mine the wooden horse is taken in and mended by a miner’s little boy, who takes him to the city to see the King, the Queen and the ten little Princes and Princesses, about whom the toy had already heard from the elephant in the ship’s hold. In the city the wooden horse’s skill in pulling heavy vehicles, confirmed by the episode with the barge, is put to service again when he draws the royal carriage; and immediately afterwards his skill in running races is drawn upon for a second time when he runs a race on behalf of the littlest Princess. After his accident at the circus he is rescued again by the miner’s boy, whose father offers to mend him for a second time, an offer he refuses in his hurry to get home, which gives him a reason to seek assistance from an old toymaker who mends him in his shop, a counterpart of Uncle Peder. It’s in the shop that the wealthy man with unruly children spots him, leading to his appalling treatment at the hands of those children; more unruly children appear later when he revisits the rich little girl who fell in love with him near the beginning, because all her fancy toys have been broken by her boy cousins, including the haughty rocking horse who so despised him at the beginning. From the wealthy man’s house he travels to the beach at the edge of the ocean he needs to recross to find Uncle Peder, and here he foils an attempt by a piratical donkey man called Black Jake to steal a donkey from the kind donkey man and his wife, who gave the wooden horse shelter and employment as he waited for a ship to take him home. Later, on the island where he finds himself after rescuing Pirate Jacky, the wooden horse foils what he thinks is a second act of thievery, when he informs the sailor that another man, apparently his double, is trying to steal the treasure. When he meets the barge people for a second time after recrossing the ocean they remember to pay him what they owe him from pulling the barge to the port. Echoes weave through the story like musical themes, binding each part to all the others and establishing the act of remembrance or recollection – that is, of diligent accounting – as a key factor in any healthy personal or financial economy.
The little wooden horse’s last adventure involves yet another act of recollection or accounting. The owner of a horse that was to have drawn the wagonette for a wedding couple as they made their way to their new home claims he has not been paid enough for the job and takes his animal away; the wooden horse promptly volunteers to take its place, offering as his credentials for doing so the fact that he is ‘a strong little horse, and a quiet one’, and inwardly recalling ‘how he had helped to pull the King’s coach round and round the city’ (p. 172). The driver has already said that the married couple are poor, so the wooden horse knows he will not be paid for this act of kindness. This is the only job he has done, in fact, apart from rescuing the sailor, without some formal agreement that it will be remunerated (he earlier offered to work for the donkey-man who mended him for free, but the donkey-man insisted on paying him handsomely). For the wooden horse, working for the King for gold and working for a poor couple for nothing are effectively equivalent; the first makes him suited for the second; and he is duly rewarded for this egalitarian outlook by the discovery that the couple are none other than Uncle Peder and the little old woman. He learns this when he hears the old woman lamenting her mistreatment of him at the beginning of the book; and so his travels come full circle, and he finds himself living happily ever after, not in the palace – where he could easily have stayed – but in a cottage, which the story has made more attractive than any palace by the intensity of the little wooden horse’s yearning for it throughout his adventures.
In the cottage at the end of the book Uncle Peder institutes a new kind of economy, made possible by the treasure his toy has brought him. Thanks to that treasure the old man does not need to go on working, but he chooses to do so, and thereby links himself to the world the wooden horse has now explored. Uncle Peder fashions toys for all the children and adults who have requested them on both sides of the ocean, listing them carefully in his mind before he begins; and although he is presumably paid five shillings for each of these new wooden horses, he goes on to fashion additional toys for little or nothing. ‘Uncle Peder,’ Moray Williams tells us, ‘could now make toys to his heart’s content, but only for those children who pleased him, or for those who had none of their own’ (p. 176). The little wooden horse may not have triggered a revolution, but in a small way he has rocked the principles behind the capitalist system, since he has enabled an artist to work the rest of his life for the love of his craft and the love of children.
The little wooden horse has put his own special skills as a horse and a toy to generous use throughout his travels; for instance when he volunteered to run a race for the littlest Princess, who had no racehorse to run for her, or when he ‘took Pirate Jacky’s coat […] between his wooden teeth and began to swim with him’ (p. 143). He has also made his own stand against the principles of free market competition. When he catches the sailor trying to steal Pirate Jacky’s treasure he afterwards learns that the would-be thief is none other than Bill Blackpatch, who discovered the treasure with Pirate Jacky years before. Bill Blackpatch therefore has a good claim to half of it; but this does not stop both men getting into a fight over which of them should have the lot. Young readers in 1938 would have been thoroughly familiar with such fights on a larger scale; the Spanish Civil War had been going on for three years by the time the book appeared, Japan had gone to war with China the year before, and 1938 saw the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler’s Germany. What these larger fights needed was a wooden horse to resolve them, and of course a willingness to accept a resolution. The wooden horse quickly settles the dispute between Pirate Jacky and Bill Blackpatch by proposing that they share the treasure between them, and the sailors have the good grace to agree to his ‘very sensible argument’, despite their piratical names (p. 156). Peace is restored, and the little wooden horse is permitted to travel on in Pirate Jacky’s boat towards his own special happy ending. Unfortunately the world in which Moray Williams lived did not do the same.
Nevertheless, in writing The Little Wooden Horse Moray Williams may have sown the seeds in some young readers’ hearts of a better settlement than the one they would shortly live through – the settlement reached through bloodshed at the close of the Second World War. Her little book remains well worth reading in our own times, when fascistic thinking is on the rise and we have great need of sensible arguments and friendship from strangers.
NOTES
[1] Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 95.
[2] Levy and Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature, p. 38. The phrase is Colin Manlove’s.
[3] See Ursula Moray Williams, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, Young Puffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 11. All references are to this edition.
[4] Williams is a little inconsistent as to the wooden horse’s capacity for pain. When he breaks his leg in the circus we are told that ‘Fortunately, having only wooden legs, the little wooden horse was not in pain’ (p. 95); but earlier, when a little old women flings him into the forest, ‘his wooden body […] smarted and ached’ (p. 24), and when he’s chased by some delinquent sea horses in the ocean ‘His wooden legs ached; he could no longer feel his wheels, and longed to rest a little on the surface of the sea, till his breath returned’ (p. 135). His pain, I believe, depends on his state of mind.
[5] Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet (New York etc.: Greenwood Pres, 1992), p. 65.
[6] See Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London: Pan Books, 1980), pp. 285-382.
[7] Levy and Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Fiction, p. 99: ‘the treasure hunt […] Geoffrey Trease identified as one of the key tales of children’s fiction’; it ‘lacks the import of the quest’.
[8] The question of who owns or deserves the treasure stolen by Smaug is central, of course, to the last scenes of Tolkien’s novel. The treasure in The Midnight Folk is not so simple either, come to think of it; it belongs to the Church and people of Santa Barbara, a fictional country in South America, and its loss by the protagonist’s great-grandfather has left his spirit restless until it can be restored to its rightful owners. Perhaps treasure hunts in children’s fiction need more attention?
[9] Peake was born, like Moray Williams, in 1911.